"On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind." The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country's president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film--perhaps his last--in which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters the outcasts of the society--homeless people and migrants--but he keeps trudging along, traversing a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts, crossing a seemingly unbridgeable superhighway, and wandering into an abandoned railyard, where police, unused to pedestrians, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism. Things don't improve when he reaches the heart of the city. There he can't help but see the alienation characteristic of its residents and the omnipresent malign influence of electronic technology. What, then, is the "Great Fall"? What is this heart-wrenching, humorous, distinctively attentive narrative trying to tell us? As usual, Peter Handke, deeply introspective and powerfully critical of the world around him, leaves it to the reader to figure out.

“On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind.� The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country’s president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film—perhaps his last—in which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters the outcasts of the society—homeless people and migrants—but he keeps trudging along, traversing a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts, crossing a seemingly unbridgeable superhighway, and wandering into an abandoned railyard, where police, unused to pedestrians, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism.   Things don’t improve when he reaches the heart of the city. There he can’t help but see the alienation characteristic of its residents and the omnipresent malign influence of electronic technology. What, then, is the “Great Fall�? What is this heart-wrenching, humorous, distinctively attentive narrative trying to tell us? As usual, Peter Handke, deeply introspective and powerfully critical of the world around him, leaves it to the reader to figure out.  

Dark stories of failed dreams and contemporary desperation in Los Angeles. In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building—the titular Starlite Terrace—Patrick Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary, and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation.   In “The Man at Noah’s Window,� Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse of the Sun,� Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In “Rider on the Storm,� Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who “almost played� on the Turtles’ 60s-hit “Happy Together,� strives to find an escape from his personal guilt. And in “The Woman in the Sea of Stars,� June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace.   In each of these four tales of wannabes and almost-weres, Roth's L.A. portraits unfold in rare style, and, in Krishna Winston’s masterful translation, the hopeless, loveless perversion of an Ed Ruscha-inspired California becomes a compelling pageant of all-American grotesques that is not to be missed.  

When Hans Jonas died in 1993, he was revered among American scholars specializing in European philosophy, but his thought had not yet made great inroads among a wider public. In Germany, conversely, during the 1980s, when Jonas himself was an octogenarian, he became a veritable intellectual celebrity, owing to the runaway success of his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility. In the 1920s, Jonas studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but the Nazi regime forced him to leave Germany for London in 1933. He later emigrated to Palestine and eventually enlisted in the British Army's Jewish Brigade to fight against Hitler. Following the Israeli War of Independence, he emigrated to the United States and took a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. He became part of a circle of friends around Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, which included Adolph Lowe and Paul Tillich. This memoir, a diverse collection of previously unpublished materials-diaries, letters, interviews, and public statements-has been organized by Christian Wiese, whose afterword links the Jewish dimensions of Jonas's life and philosophy. Because Jonas's life spanned the entire twentieth century, this memoir provides nuanced pictures of German Jewry during the Weimar Republic, of German Zionism, of the Jewish emigrants in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, and of German Jewish emigre intellectuals in New York. Since Memoirs was first published in 2008, interest in the work of Hans Jonas has grown among American academics in recent years.

In this new novel Gunter Grass examines a subject that has long been taboo - the sufferings of the Germans during the Second World War. He explores the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the deadliest maritime disaster of all time, and the repercussions upon three generations of a German family.

Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of the narrator's and the continent's past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain, Germany, and Austria, from a congress of experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of Jew's-harp virtuosos. His story and its telling are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer and appears sometimes as a demon, sometimes as the longed-for destination of his travels. Powerfully alive, honest, and attimes deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer, tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke traces and interrogates his own thoughts and perceptions while endowing the world with a mythic dimension. The Moravian Night is at once an elegy for the lost and forgotten and a novel of self-examination and uneasy discovery, from one of world literature's great voices.

Goethe was a master of the short prose form. His two narrative cycles, "Conversations of German Refugees" and "Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, " both written during a high point of his career, address various social issues and reveal his experimentation with narrative and perspective. A traditional cycle of novellas, "Conversations of German Refugees" deals with the impact and significance of the French Revolution and suggests Goethe's ideas on the social function of his art. Goethe's last novel, "Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, " is a sequel to "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship" and to "Conversations of German Refugees" and is considered to be his most remarkable novel in form.

For the first time in English, and in his signature prose poetry, the film scripts of four of Werner Herzog's early works "Herzog doesn't write traditional scripts," Film International remarked of the master filmmaker's Scenarios I and II. "Instead, he writes scenarios which are like a hybrid of film, fiction, and prose poetry." Continuing a series that Publishers Weekly pronounced "compulsively readable . . . equal parts challenging and satisfying, infuriating and enlightening," Scenarios III presents, for the first time in English, the shape-shifting scripts for four of Werner Herzog's early films: Stroszek; Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night; Where the Green Ants Dream; and Cobra Verde. We can observe Herzog's working vision as each of these scenarios unfolds in a form often dramatically different from the film's final version-as, in his own words, Herzog works himself up into "this kind of frenzy of high-caliber language and concepts and beauty." With Scenarios I and II, this volume completes the picture of Herzog's earliest work, affording a view of the filmmaker mastering his craft, well on his way to becoming one of the most original, and most celebrated, artists in his field.

The second in a series: the master filmmaker's prose scenarios for four of his notable films On the first day of editing Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog recalls, his editor said: "With this kind of material we have to pretend to invent cinema." And this, Herzog says, is what he tries to do every day. In this second volume of his scenarios, the peerless filmmaker's genius for invention is on clear display. Written in Herzog's signature fashion-more prose poem than screenplay, transcribing the vision unfolding before him as if in a dream-the four scenarios here (three never before translated into English) reveal an iconoclastic craftsman at the height of his powers. Along with his template for the film poem Fata Morgana (1971), this volume includes the scenarios for Herzog's first two feature films, Signs of Life (1968) and Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), along with the hypnotic Heart of Glass (1976). In a brief introduction, Herzog describes the circumstances surrounding each scenario, inviting readers into the mysterious process whereby one man's vision becomes every viewer's waking dream.

The Israeli analytical psychologist Erich Neumann, whom C. G. Jung regarded as one of his most gifted students, devoted much of his later writing to the theme of creativity. This is the third volume of Neumann's essays on that subject. Neumann found his examples not only in the work of writers and artists--William Blake, Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Klee, Chagall, Picasso, Trakl--but as well in that of physicists, biologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers. Confronting the problem of portraying men and women as creative beings, Neumann expanded the concepts of Jungian psychology with a more comprehensive definition of the archetype and a new concept--"unitary reality." Whether or not humanity can be restored to health from its present situation as a self-endangered species depends, according to Neumann, on whether we can experience ourselves as truly creative, in touch with our own being and the world's being. The six essays comprising this volume--"The Psyche and the Transformation of the Reality Planes," "The Experience of the Unitary Reality," "Creative Man and the 'Great Experience,'" "Man and Meaning," "Peace as the Symbol of Life," and "The Psyche as the Place of Creation"--all originated as lectures at the Eranos Conferences in the years 1952 to 1960. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Israeli analytical psychologist Erich Neumann, whom C. G. Jung regarded as one of his most gifted students, devoted much of his later writing to the theme of creativity. This is the third volume of Neumann's essays on that subject. Neumann found his examples not only in the work of writers and artists--William Blake, Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Klee, Chagall, Picasso, Trakl--but as well in that of physicists, biologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers. Confronting the problem of portraying men and women as creative beings, Neumann expanded the concepts of Jungian psychology with a more comprehensive definition of the archetype and a new concept--"unitary reality." Whether or not humanity can be restored to health from its present situation as a self-endangered species depends, according to Neumann, on whether we can experience ourselves as truly creative, in touch with our own being and the world's being. The six essays comprising this volume--"The Psyche and the Transformation of the Reality Planes," "The Experience of the Unitary Reality," "Creative Man and the 'Great Experience,'" "Man and Meaning," "Peace as the Symbol of Life," and "The Psyche as the Place of Creation"--all originated as lectures at the Eranos Conferences in the years 1952 to 1960. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.